AOC Agon AG241QG & AG241QX review: remarkable gaming monitors

Modest size, grand specs

By David van DantzigMonday 2 October 2017 04:59

Colour quality

You do not purchase a gaming monitor to use with Photoshop, but decent colour quality is still a must. In games you still want to see that red is red (and not brick brown or something), and in games saturated colours look a lot better than the other way around. Reason enough to take a closer look at the test results of the AOC Agon AG241QX and AG241QG.

First we take a look at the coverage of the sRGB colour space of both models. At 96% this is very solid, although not remarkable. Looking at the CalMAN screenshots, we see that red is slightly underrepresented, while green is slightly oversaturated. AOC also offers an sRGB-mode for both monitors, in which the coverage of this colour space is less but the accuracy is higher.

Secondly we look at the colour temperature of white with the standard mode. This is less than 6500 K for both monitors, with the AG241QG barely within the boundaries of what we find acceptable - at 6042 K there is a light colour cast.

We measure the colour- and grayscale value deviation based on the CIE2000 norm, and also include the standard deviation. Simply put this gives an indication of the amount at which the sub-measurements that the average deviations are based on, deviate from the average measurement. Aside from that the averages are now based on a bigger number of sub-measurements. These can be found with the screenshots for every tested product. There you can also find the so-called saturation sweeps, that show to what extent the head- and support colours, meaning RGB and CMY, deviate from the desired values in a continuum.

Here we do find solid results. The AG241QG has a colour fault of 3.04; this monitor has the G-sync scaler which usually does not perform as great in terms of adjustment. The AG241QX with Freesync scaler performs marginally worse.

Because AOC took the effort to include an sRGB-mode and actually calibrate it for sRGB, we show the results of it here. Unfortunately you are unable to change the brightness of both monitors in this mode, which results in 336 cd/m² for the AG241QX and even 427 cd/m² for the AG241QG. This is unpleasantly bright in most use cases. However, we do see that the AG241QX performs excellent in terms of colour fault; it can compete with the values of the Eizo Foris FS2735. With the G-sync model there is relatively less honour for AOC.

Looking at the grayscale deviation we once again see that the AG241QG is slightly better adjusted - a solid performance considering the scaler. Both monitors certainly do not perform bad for this class.

And once again the sRGB-mode results, in which the AG241QX takes the lead again but remarkably enough the AG241QG shows good results as well:

AOC Agon AG241QX

AOC Agon AG241QG

Gamma

In terms of average gamma values we do not have a lot to dislike about both monitors, although the sub values do show slightly more variation than we would like: